The President sets an agenda

Today’s editorial: There were a lot of familiar items on the to-do list President Obama laid out Tuesday. Maybe this President and this Congress will actually get them done.

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President Obama’s State of the Union address was hardly a barnburner of a speech, and that’s as it should be. This country has been so ideologically stoked for so long that it needed to be reminded of the difference between platitudes and practicality, between adrenaline and real agenda.

Between campaigning and governing.

This was a workmanlike speech that laid out what this President and this Congress need to get done, finally. Anyone who has been paying attention to the political discourse in this country for the last five or 10 years would have heard far too many familiar themes. America has been making this to-do list for years, and then somehow misplacing it.

It is time — past time, really — to pull back government subsidies to an oil industry that has been reaping billions of dollars in profits, and to steer some of those incentives to clean and renewable energy.

The nation is way overdue for a resolution of the years-long debate over illegal immigration. Securing the borders and enforcing the law of course should be done; so should finding a humane and workable solution for the millions of illegal immigrants who remain here, especially children who are here illegally through no fault of their own. It’s time we stopped reducing these human beings to just so much campaign fodder.

Nothing perhaps personifies the way America has shirked its to-do list more than its failure to keep up its traditional infrastructure and to build one for its technological future. No matter how much one espouses small government, there is no escaping the reality that government — whether federal, state or local — is responsible for the roads, bridges, sewers and water systems that we all rely on, and which, mundane as they may be, are among the key things that define a developed nation. Whether we keep them up or allow them to deteriorate speaks volumes about just how much responsibility we take for our country.

If things like roads and bridges are a nation’s undone chores, simplifying the tax code might be the homework it just doesn’t want to do. We’ve been hearing that assignment at least as far back as the Reagan administration.

It’s the same with a host of other things on America’s to-do list — high-speed rail, broadband Internet access, consolidating government, ending deficit spending and living within our means. It’s all too familiar.

Sometimes, we need a speech like this. One that’s almost a little boring, to remind us that the real work of a nation isn’t tearing everything apart and starting over, or cutting ribbons all over the place, or inciting the masses to storm the … well, whatever one storms nowadays.

It’s about the not particularly exciting but absolutely necessary task of moving the country forward, together. That was perhaps the most important message in a speech that strived not to be divisive; a reminder that the election is over, and two parties that have been at each other’s throats need now to find a way to govern as one.